Becoming an Adaptive & Resilient Organization: 3 Lessons from CityStudio (Education)
This article is part of a series profiling innovative organisations from various industries. Find all of the articles here: Becoming an Adaptive & Resilient Organization: 3 Things We Learned During COVID-19.
This series is part of PH1 Research’s mandate to provide business leaders free resources to improve their customer and employee strategies during this crisis.
CityStudio brings innovation, engagement, and experimentation to Vancouver’s City Hall by uniting city staff with post-secondary students, faculty, and community. It is a unique opportunity for post-secondary students to work on projects which have social impact on the community they live in. The model teaches them to be critical thinkers by presenting them with real challenges in all their complexity, and supporting them with real resources from across the city.
Since being founded in 2011 it has grown into a collaboration between the City of Vancouver, Simon Fraser University (SFU), University of British Columbia (UBC), Langara College, British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT), Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECUAD), and the Native Education College (NEC).
CityStudios can now be found all around the world.
Duane Elverum is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of CityStudio.
He has taught at universities for 20 years, first at the UBC School of Architecture where he created the Hornby Island design/build program, and subsequently at SFU’s Centre for Dialogue as an associate and visiting professor.
3 Lessons About Adaptability & Resilience from CityStudio (Education)
This crisis forced CityStudio to quickly take their operations online — something that was a natural transition, in part, because the term was already underway and students normally employ digital channels to collaborate on complex projects with other students and partners. By creating inclusive and collaborative environments, CityStudio’s inter-disciplinary curriculum empowers students to get hands-on experience innovating, rather than discussing it as an abstract topic.
#1 Online education must be inter-disciplinary
Online education can feel distant, remote, and tedious. One person’s voice can get lost amongst the many and more importantly, it’s hard to tell who isn’t engaged. This applies to Zoom meetings as well.
It is important for educators —and people leading meetings— to recognize that their audience need to feel included. Online education can be more inclusive and participatory by focusing on inter-disciplinary topics and exercises which can excite each person’s varied interests. In the case of CityStudio this is about transforming the city you live in, whereas for other educators this can be through projects which demonstrate how academic topics can impact day-to-day life.
#2 Online educators need to learn how to be creators
Duane Elverum strongly believes that online education will not succeed if all it is are videos of educators talking about topics. A quick scan of online courses shows that the most popular are very often personality based. We need to become much better at the medium and he believes the answer to digitizing education is found partly in the best and most popular viral videos on YouTube where creators drive content by connecting deeply to the audience, mastering story-telling, and most importantly and perhaps most challenging, posting regularly to build an audience. The lessons of YouTube for online education are limitless, and he is watching this space very closely.
In this coming digital era of education, educators may be best served by designing the curriculum and engaging creators and a design partner but then having a creator/producer to making truly engaging and compelling online experiences videos. It will be very interesting to see, given Youtube’s ubiquitous presence and market dominance, which schools move fully into this space. Given that educators won’t be able to spot students who may be struggling, the lesson format must inspire participation, as well as include opportunities to assess engagement.
#3 Online communities are the perfect opportunity to create a culture of mentorship
The support of a mentor is often cited as a critical guide to helping people find their unique path to personal success. Unfortunately, finding a mentor isn’t top-of-mind until these students have started on their professional careers, and even then can be a difficult and daunting task. Mentorship programs can also be labour and resource intensive, but this will likely be a necessary investment for schools to succeed in the online environment
Online communities are an opportunity to connect students to one another, to educators, partners, and alumni in ways never imagined before. By flattening the hierarchy of education —where students are encouraged to ask for support and find collaborators— they can get guidance from more people who can inspire them in meaningful ways.
Register for the June 17 webinar How Organisations Become Adaptive & Resilient in a Time of Crisis to learn directly from some of the leaders profiled.
More lessons from this series:
- 3 Lessons from Zahra Ebrahim (Civic Engagement): Their solution required no technical background and it helps communities precisely because of its simplicity. They wanted to create a resource that made it extremely easy to connect people needing help to resources offering help.
- 3 Lessons from Young Enterprise (Education/Charity): This crisis forced the charity to quickly re-think their entire model. The needs of teachers, youth workers, students, and parents all changed and the charity had to adapt to deliver support in new ways.
- 3 Lessons from CityStudio (Education): CityStudio brings innovation, engagement, and experimentation to Vancouver’s City Hall by uniting city staff with post-secondary students, faculty, and community.
- 3 Lessons from Dr. Angèle Beausoleil (Education): The abrupt shift from in-person to online classes meant that Dr. Beausoleil had 2 days to take in-person lab-based business design, innovation, and design thinking classes and rethink how to offer the same learning outcomes digitally.
- 3 Lessons About Adaptability & Resilience from Ernesto Peña, Ph.D (Charity/ Technology): As a technology platform which has the primary goal of making giving easy, he has had the privilege of being able to study topics such as why donors stop giving and what makes them comfortable to give to a charity for the first time.
- 3 Lessons About Adaptability & Resilience from Dr. Emma Aiken-Klar (Innovation/Anthropology): Having a renewed sense of purpose in spite of this uncertainty can help teams move through these moments of change. We’re no longer what we used to be and we’re not sure what we will become.
- 3 Lessons About Adaptability & Resilience from Tyson Villeneuve (Events/Hospitality): Events as an industry effectively flatlined and we were the first to get hit: Large sports events, festivals, gatherings. The entire industry was shut down two weeks before restaurants.
- 3 Lessons About Adaptability & Resilience from Dianne Dredge, Ph.D (Tourism / Community Engagement): Her lens from the perspective of regions and tourism ecosystems that had to completely rebuild provide lessons on how industries can become adaptive and resilient.
This series is part of PH1 Research’s mandate to provide business leaders free resources to improve their customer and employee strategies during the COVID-19 crisis.
